I've been looking into
LISP recently (initially for university stuff).
Historically, I think it played an outstanding role in the
development of computing. Bringing functional programming to
a world of assembler and low-level C hacking is clearly an
achievement in its own right. I am particularly impressed
learning that LISP was used to
control some NASA spacecraft - today most people don't
even use anything higher level than C or perhaps C++ on
robotic systems, and that's on much more powerful and
significantly more accessible hardware (try attaching a JTAG
interface to a probe on another planet to debug a problem
with your code).

From a language design point of
view I'm not overly impressed by (Common) LISP though. Some
of the criticism I have for it is arguably purely a question
of taste: I find the lack of mixfix operators rather
annoying, but of course it makes parsing by orders of
magnitude easier. More of a problem is the apparent lack of
strong typing - e.g. LISP will happily allow you to have
elements of differents types in a list, among other more
serious issues. It also appears to be possible to change
semantics based on input types of a function. The fact that
functions (like +) can take a variable number of arguments
is a bit of a nail in the coffin from my point of view. I'll
keep using Haskell for real world functional programming.

GHC on Debian/armel (ARM EABI)

A while back Riku Voipio called
for help
with missing bits for Debian/armel one of which was GHC.
Not knowing Martin Guy was already (privately) working on
bootstrapping GHC (an ARM port existed already) I decided to
have a go at it. The GHC porting documentation is clearly
excellent and resulted in quick
success (relatively quick given the slow build
hardware). At that time Martin was already far ahead of me.
Meanwhile he has made
packages available. I have yet to get around to
reporting some minor problems GHC upstream and I may also
investigate why ghci doesn't work at some point, but
basically this means Haskell is available to the EABI crowd
:)

Final Random Bit: Linux Kernel in a
Nutshell

When someone pointed me to Greg
K-H's book Linux Kernel
in a Nutshell my initial reaction was: Building a kernel
isn't exactly rocket science. Why would I want to read a
book about it?

Well, it seems I was wrong. I
skimmed through the PDF version today and noticed a very
useful feature of make menuconfig: Hit /
and it allows you to search the CONFIG_ strings.